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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons the self-driving craze in tech is so silly: We have vehicles you can commute in and not drive called public transit. Self-driving cars is desire for public transit that doesn't have your rich self sitting next to a poor person on the way to work.

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Or you know people that value their time...

For me to use Public Transport here would increase my commute time to work by order of magnitude, not to mention all the places I go weekly that is not on a public transit stop or would require multiple line hops and be many times more time consuming than if I just drove directly their in my own personal vehicle

Public transport only works in area with High Population Density

There is probably a ton of room for improvement and disruptive innovation in public transit, in terms of improving speed, available endpoints, etc.

It's true public transit will never really be valuable for extremely rural areas, but we should be working to ensure that in anywhere there's a significant quantity of people, that public transit is the cheapest and most convenient way to travel. Public transit isn't going to win by banning cars, it's going to need to win by improving lives.

I can't imagine how bad public transport must be to increase your commute time by an order of magnitude. I use public transport precisely because I value my time - it takes longer(around x1.5) than using a car, but that time is relaxing, can be used to read a book, listen to a podcast or just order your thoughts. Time spent in a car is stressful and requires your focus and attention.

I'm not sure what kind of population density you need to make public transport workable, but it's a blessing when you have it available. There's some sample math at the end of this article(https://www.ptua.org.au/myths/density/ - technical appendix) which concludes that you don't really need that high a density(it focuses on Melbourne), as long as people actually prefer to use the public transport service over their own cars.

Crappy public transit is pretty common in the Bay Area.

Looking at my own home in the South Bay.

My 10 mile commute takes 15 minutes driving.

By public transit, it's walk five minutes to light rail, wait ten minutes, ride 50 minutes, transfer, wait ten minutes for the next bus, ride 15 minutes, walk 10 minutes.

Admittedly, 7x isn't quite an order of magnitude, but close enough.

I really don't see anyway to get busses economical down here unless you had much more traffic and higher density.

Not really bad public transport, but we have no traffic.

For me to go to work on the bus route I have to go pretty far away from my home to then work my way back due to the way the bus route flows.

or I can get in my car, drive to 10 mins traffic free, and be a work

Around here people use Public Transport because they have no other means of travel, not because on congestion or anything else

It depends on local details. In most large cities public transit assumes you live in the suburbs and work downtown. Jobs are moving to the suburbs, to get to them means a ride downtown, and then a ride back out. I know of people with a 4 mile commute who drive (why they don't bike is a good question) because they bus ride would be 3 hours each way.

As a Chicago native, I can definitely see a case for like a north-south suburban Metra line, being potentially amazing. But our rail system primarily piggybacks on freight lines which all are concerned about going to/from Chicago proper.

I don't feel buses are nearly as productive because of traffic. There are some nifty routes around Chicago where buses are allowed to drive the shoulder in traffic jams, and hence, do better than cars on travel time, but the north-south suburban expressway doesn't have that arrangement.

I think the issue is that public transportation is rarely point to point. A point to point self-driving transportation capsule could be more efficient and be better utilized than public transportation.

Point to point is by definition wasteful. Look at how goods are moved around the globe: it's always hub and spoke because that's what works best rather than an infinite number of dedicated routes. Walk on foot, bike, skateboard, take a bird or lime to a hub and you remove a ton of engineering headaches. You could have the hub to hub route be completely isolated from traffic and pedestrians and many of the highly publicized issues with self driving cars would be eliminated with zero engineering required. But lets keep wasting time and effort figuring out how to make an uber you don't have to talk to during your ride instead.

The hub-and-spoke model is great for moving goods (and people) between cities, but you'll note that pickup and final delivery are still handled by fleets of trucks. Mass transit is well-suited for routes shared by masses of people with minimal luggage all wanting to transit on the same schedule; point-to-point transportation is needed to handle the rest.

What's really wasteful is using point-to-point transit for a task better suited for mass transit—or vice-versa.

Until there’s a politically viable solution to homelessness, reasonable people are going to prefer spaces with basic socioeconomic filters like “doesn’t reek of urine” and “isn’t obviously an untreated mentally ill hard drug user.”

Exposure to human feces is a legitimate factor in transportation mode choice right up there with cost and door to door time. We are all worse off for transit advocates’ side dismissals of its role.

I'd much rather have my own self-driving climate-controlled more private space filled with my own stuff than be packed into a subway or bus every day, yes.

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